Pages

Announcing Brick & Motor: Bringing Scranton Art on the Road

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

We’ve got big
news! Our pal and ScrantonMade graphic
designer Samantha Nardelli and her team are taking Scranton art on the road
with a new venture called Brick & Motor.
Read all about this exciting concept and fantastic opportunity for area
artists.

So what is Brick &
Motor and what sparked the idea to take Scranton art on the road?

The whole idea stemmed
from a few different places, actually. Tim & I like traveling, even if it’s
just a day trip, and we like going to different and new events. Last fall, we
were taking a bunch of mini trips (PA, NJ, & NY) and we always ended up in
artsy towns, even if by accident. So we started thinking about ways that my
design company, Shanty Town Design, can reach out to other communities for
design work. Since I vend at the ScrantonMade events with you guys as a way to
promote my design work, we started looking into other similar events to promote
at. When I vend, however, I mostly use it as a way to get connected to the
artists by collaborating, offering something interactive, or giving promotions
away, rather than selling merchandise. So, we’re trying a new thing with
selling our own art. We did a test run at the Susquehanna Breakdown and it went
awesome!

As we were chatting
with friends about the idea, we thought about taking some of their work with
us. I always try to promote and connect them or at least let them know of cool
things going on, where they can get their names into the community and get
people interested in their work. Then the gears just kept turning from there.
If we’re going to do this, go on the road full time, we want everyone we know
to be a part of it. The amount of talent in our little city is so inspiring.
All of our intro artists are involved in the Scranton arts community one way or
another. We’ll be picking up more artist work as we travel through other
like-minded cities, but we still will be keeping our roots as our sole
inspiration.

Where are you planning
to go and for how long?

We’re estimating the
entire trip to take 6 months to 1 year. We have a basic map started, with the
key areas we’d like to stop and some personal notes on festivals we’d like to
hit. There are a few cities in Georgia with some awesome arts festivals, North
Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, over to Cali, and up to Oregon and Washington. We’d
like to spend a little more time than usual in some of the cities, so we can
really get to know the area, the locals, and the art and music scenes. We think
each major stop, we’ll stick around for about 2 weeks. The timeframe of when
we’ll be in certain cities will depend on our “leave date”, which we haven’t
set yet. It’s all going to depend heavily on when the markets and festivals
take place. We’re going to start applying to markets like The Big Heap,
Renegade Craft Fair, The Big Flea, and Handmade & Bound in late summer,
early fall since the application processes start months before the actual event.
Come August, we’ll really have to lock down which markets we’re going to sell
at and when. In the downtime, and when we first start our journey, we’ll be
hopping on Punk Rock Flea Markets, regular Flea Markets, Pop Up events, and First
Fridays (or the area’s equivalent).

Do you have a roster
of artists yet that have signed up to send their work on the road with you?

We’re working on
locking down the specifics of who and what we’ll be taking on the road, since
we won’t actually be purchasing the bulk of our inventory until late summer.
Some items have expiration dates, some people are prepping for Arts on the
Square, some have other events they are working towards so we don’t want to
take away from that. A few people that are definite and are shown in our
campaign video are as follows:

As a whole, we’re
looking at taking about 30+ artists work from the area, to start. If there’s
anyone I haven’t contacted yet that’s looking to get involved, I encourage them
to reach out to us!

How do you plan to
promote Brick & Motor while on the road?

Most of our promotion
will be through social media and blogging. Once we know a certain city or event
we will be visiting, we’ll connect with our followers to spread the word, so
people know that we’re coming, and that it’s a big deal. We’ll be posting
updates about our travels, work, and experiences as we go along. We’ve also
been throwing around some cute ways to interact with our customers, like
offering a Daisy kissing booth. Daisy is our beagle and kissing is all she
really does.

For those who would
like to keep up to date, even after our crowdfunding campaign ends, I suggest
signing up for our newsletter, and following us on Instagram or Facebook. Once
we start the trailer renovation process, we’ll be posting photos and updates
galore!

What’s been your
biggest challenge so far?

It’s all challenging,
in a good way. It’s all a learning process. I’m a designer, and while I’m a
business owner too, there’s a lot to know about the inner working of a
’storefront business’ where you’re selling a physical item. Other than just the
general growing pains (if you can call it that at this point), for me, probably
understanding how camper trailers work. Luckily, Tim’s been doing some impressive
research on figuring out what’s what, and we have supportive family that’s been
giving us crash courses on automotives. We’ve been looking at trailers for the
past few weeks, and we just want to make sure we make the right decision.

What are you most
excited about?

Just everything! The
whole thing is going to be an amazing experience. I’m sure there’s going to be
bumps in the road along the way, but we’re going to be doing what we love, and
what we’re passionate about. How can you not be excited about that?

How is the
crowdfunding campaign going and can people still contribute?

We’ve raised enough to start trailer shopping,
and we have been. The rest of the funds that we raise will go towards the
renovation process (converting it into a storefront), travel supplies, and
vending fees. People can contribute up untilJune 13th, though, depending on how the rest of the
campaign goes, we may push our date to ‘on going’ through a neat feature
IndieGoGo has called ‘In Demand’. This will allow us to continue to promote our
story, and share more of our renovation process all summer, until we leave.
We’ll actually be vending at the Scranton Zine Fest on our technical closing
day;June 13th, and will have something fun in the works since
it’s our last day of the campaign. So stay tuned!

Do you guys have
anything else going on during your campaign that you’d like to share?

We’ve got a little
photo contest going on to help our campaign gain more exposure. Everyone who
takes a picture of themselves holding up something that says Brick & Motor
and our URL, posts it on Facebook or Instagram, with us tagged, will go into a
drawing to win a free 16 x 20 print plus one other little surprise from
one of our vendors. We’ll be picking the winner on June 1st!